While a faction of the Montana GOP has focused on allegations of voter fraud related to the 2020 presidential election, a bipartisan group of lawmakers and election officials are proposing reforms to the state’s election security to boost voter confidence in the process.
Rep. David Bedey, R-Hamilton, is sponsoring a pair of bills that would criminalize tampering with vote-counting machines, along with a measure to extend the state’s post-election audit process to include local elections. The proposals emerged from an unofficial working group of Republican and Democratic lawmakers and others, including the offices of the Secretary of State and Commissioner of Political Practices, who began meeting after the 2021 session.
Rep. Steve Gist, R-Great Falls, helped hatch the idea of an informal group to tackle election issues during the interim. Given the often heated — and sometimes misinformed — debates around election processes in the last two years, Gist felt that approach could help “slow the tone down a bit,” he said in an interview last week.
“I want more people to get educated about the process, and I want more people to get involved,” he said.
The Montana Association of Counties helped organize those meetings. Eric Bryson, a lobbyist for the group, spoke Monday as a proponent for House Bill 173, which creates penalties for installing unauthorized devices in tabulators.
“This doesn’t really change current practices,” Bryson said, “but it alleviates concerns that we heard over the last couple sessions about connectivity to the devices that are used and authorized in Montana to the internet,” Bryson said.
The penalty for tampering with the machines would be set at up to 10 years in prison and up to $50,000. The bill would specifically require all machines used to count ballots be “certified by the manufacturer to be free of any unauthorized modems or other external communication devices.” That lack of connectivity has long been required by the Secretary of State’s office for machines used in the state, but the requirement is not currently in law.
The concerns Bryson referred to were on display during the bill’s lengthy hearing before the House State Administration Committee. A handful of Republican lawmakers on the committee peppered Dana Corson, the Secretary of State’s elections director, with questions related to modems and the potential for algorithms to determine election results.
“Do you agree that the people of Montana are pretty frustrated and fed up with the machines?” asked Rep. Bob Phalen, R-Lindsay, the committee’s vice chair and one of the Legislature’s most vocal champions of voter fraud theories.
“I think there are questions from certain components of the citizenry that might be questioning the things you’re questioning today,” Corson responded.
Over the past two years, a handful of GOP lawmakers have been especially active in holding events and bringing speakers to Montana to cast doubt on the accuracy of the tabulators used in Montana’s elections. And while nonpartisan security experts have acknowledged potential security vulnerabilities in the machines, Montana’s post-election audit reflects the best practices for ensuring those results match the paper ballots actually cast by Montanans in each federal election.
Montana law has, since 2009, required an extensive post-election audit process for counties using tabulating machines to count ballots; a handful of smaller counties still hand-count their ballots.
After each federal election, state officials randomly choose a selection of races and precincts in each county that uses tabulators (officials from three statewide offices roll 10-sided dice in a public process at the state Capitol). Those races and precincts are then subject to hand-counts of the paper ballots to check that the tabulators accurately counted the votes. Those audits have never identified any significant discrepancies between the official machine tallies and the hand-counted audits, according to Corson.
Still, those who doubt the accuracy of the state’s elections have pointed to the fact that citizens can’t open up and inspect the machines themselves. Some have suggested that modems or other hardware could be present in the machines to allow an outsider to tamper with the results.
Echoing the only opponent to the bill, Rep. Linda Reksten, R-Polson, suggested a third-party inspection to ensure there are no modems or other devices in the machines could help shore up trust in the state’s elections. The vendors who sell and service the tabulators have largely resisted those calls on the grounds they could compromise the systems’ security.
Corson responded that visual observation of the hardware wouldn’t be able to make that determination. He also noted that there has never been an unexplained difference between the machine tally and Montana’s hand-counted audits.
“A better way to do it is to simply look at what happens when you run the machine, and does it give you the predicted results, and are you able to audit it,” Corson told the committee.
Republican Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen has been reticent to publicly address voter fraud allegations since taking office after the 2020 elections. But Corson offered one of the office’s most forceful public repudiations of those theories to date.
“What evidence or claim can be brought to say, ‘No, in the 2020 or 2016 election, I think in county whatever, precinct this, something happened?’” Corson asked. “Show me some evidence. We don’t have evidence like that, even though we do recounts, even though we do post-election audits, we don’t have data like that to support that theory.”
The Monday morning discussion amounted to an extension of the committee’s hearing last week on the working group’s other bill, HB 172. It’s also being carried by Bedey.
Under current law, the state’s post-election audit only applies to federal primary and general elections. HB 172 would allow counties to conduct their own audits of local elections as well. The idea emerged in part from Ravalli County, where a vocal group of residents have been pushing county officials to eliminate the use of tabulators.
“Whether it’s modems or algorithms or what have you, the beauty of our post-election audit process is that we’re counting paper ballots,” Bedey said.
The bill also drew support from the Secretary of State’s office and the Montana Association of Clerk and Recorders. A lobbyist for an advocacy group called “Secure Democracy USA” also spoke in favor. The group, which does not disclose its donors, describes itself as supporting increased voter access and election security reforms “to improve our elections so they are free from partisan interference and fair for every voter to participate in.”
The committee has not taken action on either bill.
Let the news come to you
Get any of our free daily email newsletters — news headlines, opinion, e-edition, obituaries and more.
Send us your thoughts and feedback as a letter to the editor. Submit by email, by post to 2820 W. College St., Bozeman, MT 59718 or use our online form.
Support quality local journalism. Become a subscriber.
Subscribers get full, survey-free access to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle's award-winning coverage both on our website and in our e-edition, a digital replica of the print edition.
